Just like a year ago, we are hearing a lot of guff about how the euro crisis is over, and just like a year ago the people I talk to in Brussels are becoming increasingly alarmed by the complacency of the European establishment. It does seem as though the only thing that makes Europe’s useless political class worry is the risk of imminent cardiac arrest, as proxied by bond yields and the like; but the cancer of unemployment will do just as much damage if allowed to progress unchecked.
Here are the latest Eurozone unemployment statistics. Just because we are becoming used to this sort of news does not mean that they are even remotely acceptable. They are grim.
There are certain costs that are obviously not worth paying to keep the EMU experiment going. One is a dilution of the continent’s democratic traditions. Another is unemployment rates of the sort we are seeing in Spain and Greece. No doubt crocodile tears will be shed by supporters of status quo macroeconomic policies, but such responses are no longer acceptable. EMU supporters, and €-sceptics who are worried about the costs of an EMU break-up, now have to start being very concrete in terms of proposing Eurozone economic policies, including short run monetary and fiscal policies, that can start reversing these trends in 2013. (A group of us tried to do so here, for example.) And then we need to see such policies being implemented, quickly.
You have to live through times like this to really appreciate the wisdom of Keynes’ famous line about the long run.